Sep 19 Thu 2013 MOLLY BARNES hosts Painter JOHN LEES

Remrakble presentation of life's work by teacher,drawer, painter, and repainter
Today (Sep 19 Thu 2013) a delightful lunch hour presentation at Molly Barnes' remarkable series on artists at the Roger Smith exemplified the precious quality of talks in the series which involves practicing artists of stature explaining their life's work to an audience primarily of fellow artists and other colleagues themselves long established in the New York, California or other art worlds of America. The particular advantage of such talks arranged by Molly Barnes, a Los Angeles dealer who has been running her series at the Roger Smith Hotel for several years now, is that the speaker is addressing fellow artists or others with their own deep understanding of the practice of art and the context in which art finds exhibition space and collector;s and museum walls. This allows a degree of confidence and sincerity in the artists who speak which is unmatched in any other public forum, and a degree of self examination and insight, and confiding that insight to listeners, which is probably unique in their experience, as well as the experience of the listeners, excepting of course their close friends and working colleagues, and perhaps members of the press who win their confidence in one to one interviews.,
Even so, John Lees engaged us with an unmatched degree of unguarded spontaneity in describing the motivation and aims of his works which stood out even on this exceptional platform. His charming mixture of unhesitatingly forthright confession of the source and development of his paintings and a certain bashful hesitation in making grand claims for them as achievements was delightful. It seems quite certain that however sophisticated Lees may be in the politics of art - he is a teacher as well as a painter, giving classes in drawing on Thursday evenings open to all at the New York School of Studio Art, as well as being acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum in New York, and he has an unusually dedicated following among collectors - he is essentially what we all hope every artist might be, and that is a child of nature rather than a child of artifice.
This quality of honest, unvarnished sincerity in giving an account of himself and his art - sincerity accompanied by a humorous view of life and himself, which he afterwards said had started at school in self defense - seems deeply imbued in the paintings he showed in a slide review of his main works. Many of them had been revised, as it were, after the initial essay pf his talents - patches applied or added, sometimes the surfaces sanded to show older painting underneath what had been applied later, all in the cause of taking his initial inspiration further in the same work, as opposed to starting all over in the usual manner. Mr Lees style is expressionist in the impressionist manner,ranging from painterly and colorful sketches of ,models faces and figures where the outline of the subject is instantly discerned to landscapes of countryside and closeups of tree stumps and similar where the outlines of the image only slowly emerge from a forest of multicolored brushstrokes.
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Impressionist/expressionist John Lees will speak on his art, his aims and his motivations in this latest in this latest talk by a well known painter with a dedicated following among collectors in Molly's remarkably intimate series.
[caption id="attachment_481" align="alignnone" width="610"] John Lees put a woman in this version of Bathtub[/caption]Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by John Lees, opening on May 16th. This will be the artist’s third solo show at the gallery.
Lees characteristically spends years working and reworking his paintings and drawings. The build up and sanding down of paint, tears, patches and even written diary logs of dates are among the physical reminders of the lengthy time spent on each painting. Although the works in this exhibition are recently completed, many were in fact started decades ago.
John Lees paints as if his paintings were recurring dreams. In this exhibition, Lees’ dreams include: simple dreams such as an Umbrian landscape or swaying treetops; childhood dreams of Dilly Dally - an early TV character with whom Lees identified, or of Rte 66 – his family’s escape route to the West Coast; and psychological dreams, particularly one of the lonely clown as painter. More complex memories come into play in his portraits: one of his mother, Mater, started in 1979 and completed in 2012, and another of Lees father, Man in an Armchair – a subject of more than one painting in this show. In two works featuring the Metropolitan Museum Cloisters’ angel, Lees has transformed earlier ‘stream’ paintings into the flowing Romanesque angel. Memory moves to form - the stream - and the form moves to meaning - a Romanesque angel. Throughout, for Lees, the media is as deep as the memories and vice versa.
Lees is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund Award; the Francis J. Greenburger Award; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant; and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant. His work can be found in a host of public institutions, most notably the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Kemper Collection, Kansas City, MO; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and The New Museum, New York, NY.
John Lees was born in 1943 in Denville, NJ. He received his BFA and MFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. He has been exhibiting in New York since 1977 and has been an instructor at the New York Studio School since 1988. He lives and works in upstate New York.
Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West 25th Street
New York (NY) 10001 United States
Tel. +1 (212) 2422772
info@bettycuninghamgallery.com
www.bettycuninghamgallery.com
Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 10am until 6pm